Things to Avoid when making PowerPoint Presentations

Microsoft PowerPoint presentations have become the norm in most businesses. One of the reasons is that they are easy to produce, they are easy to update and effective to inject some visual effects that can make your presentations stand out and hit the nail on the head, so to speak. However used in the wrong they have also spelled disaster. In fact, if they fail to produce the desired result, they can be a source of distraction and actually go contrary to the intended purpose of the presentation.

One of the things you will want to avoid in your Microsoft PowerPoint presentations is the addition of sound effects. Sounds are distracting and this is the case if you will have prepared the presentations on a computer with average speed and you will have to show it on a much slower computer. The transitions and the sounds will appear sluggish and the entire playback will be comical and will prove completely distracting. Unless it is a science fiction presentation, please leave out the laser effects.

When you are presenting Microsoft PowerPoint slides, by all means avoid the standard clipart that comes with it. Most are simply tired of seeing these pictures. Unless you have a really creative imagination, leave out this ‘visual cliche’ since it shows a lack of creativity. Why not enhance your message with scanned photographs instead or buy better-quality photos from websites that do that. I can assure you, you will find some pretty amazing photographs that will be unique to your presentations. By all means, maintain originality by avoiding clipart.

Presentations are meant to be a good media to depict ideas graphically and offer an overview of what is being put across. This means that you want to avoid a lot of text-heavy slides in your Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. One way to do that is to avoid paragraphs and complete sentences. By all means avoid quotations in your presentations. Limit any text to five lines or less and use word phrases that have been organized into points. In this way your audience will be able to retain what you put across. The above points will make you Microsoft PowerPoint presentations both appealing but also educational; and your audience will be sure to love it.